Infinity dreams, p.4
Divinely Destined, page 4
Illness struck them down just as easily, their strength waned with age, and economic downturns rendered their labour and accumulated wealth worthless. Their pronouncements of authority could not ward off famine, their boasts of strength could not deflect disease, and their promises of security dissolved in the face of unforeseen circumstances, leaving those who depended on them vulnerable despite the established social order.
The very system that elevated them did not imbue them with immunity to the vagaries of life, highlighting the inherent fragility of relying solely on one segment of society for protection and provision. It was precisely this inherent fallibility of men as protectors and providers—a stark contrast to the societal roles they were assigned and the privileges they enjoyed—that left women in an especially precarious position.
When the expected shield faltered, when the promised sustenance proved insufficient, women bore the brunt of the consequences, lacking the same societal standing or access to resources to navigate hardship. Their vulnerability was further exacerbated by a social structure that rendered them dependent, limiting their autonomy in matters of survival and security.
This dependence opened the door to exploitation. The imbalance of power inherent in a system that privileged men could be readily leveraged, leaving women susceptible to manipulation, coercion and outright abuse. Their lack of independent means or social authority made them easy targets, their needs subservient and secondary to dominant male interests.
The repeated and systemic failure of men to consistently fulfil the roles of protectors and providers created a fundamental disequilibrium within the social fabric of society. When the expected stability and security fail to materialise for a significant portion of the population—women and their children—the entire system's legitimacy begins to erode.
The social contract, implicitly or explicitly built on this division of labour and responsibility, is revealed as unreliable. This doesn't just cause individual suffering; it undermines the very foundation upon which social order is maintained.
Why should two groups—the lionesses and the hyenas—adhere and accept a societal system that doesn't deliver on its promises of stability and security?
When there is no rain and no lion’s share, the repeated failure leads to the emergence of new power structures. When the existing system demonstrably fails to provide security and justice for a significant portion of its members, those members will inevitably seek other ways to ensure that their rights and needs are recognised and met.
These emergent alternative structures, born out of necessity and the failure of the dominant system, creates an energetic force field that can eventually compel the existing structure to adapt or be replaced. The cost of maintaining a system that consistently and repeatedly fails a significant portion of its population eventually outweighs the perceived benefits of its traditional structure, forcing a restructuring to ensure greater viability.
The increasing decline in preference for male children is linked to the consequences of increased societal complexity. As roles diversified and interdependence grew, the strict adherence of a purely gender-based division of labour became increasingly obvious. The inherent talents and skills within the female population, previously confined to domestic roles, became increasingly valuable in a more complex society.
The corresponding desire for smaller families stems from a subtle and long-term shift in the perception of what truly constitutes societal progress and legacy. Instead of solely focusing on biological continuation, societies, as a whole, begin to place a greater emphasis on cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions as a means of leaving a lasting impact.
The shifts in priorities were not always conscious choices or direct responses to immediate needs, but rather, emergent outcomes of complex societal dynamics and the unforeseen consequences of earlier preferences and practices. Cultures are not static entities driven by infallible realities or linear logic. Rather, they are complex systems that evolve in unfathomable ways, driven by rain and drought.
It is the drought itself that leads to the gradual emergence of new values and priorities.
❁
The ground feels unsteady beneath my feet, not from any earthquake, but from the slow, creeping realisation that the foundation I was told to trust is riddled with cracks. No, no, this is not the work of a single, dramatic collapse, but a series of repeated betrayals, which constantly eroded and wore down the security that I was promised if I would follow the system.
The self-proclaimed strong hands that were supposed to shield me faltered, the voice that pledged to provide failed to deliver, and the person that promised companionship neglected me when it mattered most.
The expected world order had unravelled.
The fury that settled deep within me stemmed not just from unmet needs, but from the betrayal of deeply ingrained and internalised expectations. If only these failures were mere accidents. Alas! They arise, as they tend to, from a systemic entitlement, a belief that their priorities, their comforts and their desires should take precedence.
The missed meal, the unpaid debt, the abandoned promise—these are not just hardships, but evidence of a profound disregard for the trust placed in them. The repercussions are real: the gnawing fear of destitution, the constant calculation of dwindling resources, the sacrifice of dreams once held dear, the burden of navigating a world suddenly made more hostile and precarious.
It is, however, amidst the struggle that a strange and defiant strength begins to stir. It's not born of choice, but of necessity, a quiet rebellion against the narrative that limited my worth and value whilst elevating another’s. It's the slow, arduous process of rebuilding, not just a life, but a worldview.
It's the learning of skills I was told were beyond me, the forging of alliances with others who have been similarly betrayed, and the unsettling realisation that perhaps, the strength I sought was always within me, waiting to be unearthed from beneath the rubble of another person’s repeated failure to protect and to provide.
This newfound strength demanded accountability. It stemmed from a refusal to accept that failures are inevitable or excusable, especially in light of the privilege that men were granted from birth. Strength is an insistence that those who have repeatedly failed be held responsible for the consequences of their actions, not only vis-à-vis apologies or empty vessels of remorse, but through a shift in behaviour and a dismantling of the systems that permitted such oversights and failures to occur in the first place.
The repercussions they must face are not abstract either: the loss of trust, the disintegration of the family unit, social ostracization, and the potential for legal and economic consequences must all come together to force a reckoning.
They cannot avoid the cost for every consequence is proof that their choices affect not just themselves, but everyone around them.
11 Divinely Destined
It was still the hyena’s voice I heard, but this time, there was no laughter and no cackle for this was no laughing matter. Her voice was suddenly serious, almost motherly. The hyena was the wise woman who had seen it all and known it all. She was the one who knew the burdens we women had carried lifetime after lifetime, incarnation after incarnation.
She was the one who knew that our stories could only ever be echoes. She was the one who knew that the only freedom we ever had was the freedom to leave.
We, the women of this village, had never had the freedom to just be.
Let him go, the hyena’s voice whispered. Let the lion go. You are divinely destined for so much more.
❁
That night, I had a dream.
❁
In the beginning before all beginnings, the hyena, a solar emissary, clawed the sun from the great void and dragged it across the sky to thaw the frozen earth. The Sun, the light-giver, bled brilliance onto the world, each surge of warmth rebirthing its own trailing shadow. Wherever light flourished, darkness emerged as its inseparable twin. These close counterparts and companions, hinted at a deeper dimension: a veiled reality clinging to the edges of perception. The hyena’s laughter heralded both the monsoon and drought for the two, much like light and shadow, are inseparable in their essence.
❁
In my dream, this is what the Mother Hyena told me.
❁
The humans have always feared us, the hyena. In days of old, the villagers would placate us by feeding us scraps to ward us off. Some humans were naturally intelligent. They realised that it was not in their self-interest to starve some while others feasted. Our nightly visits blurred the line human and animal, our presence a reminder that safety depended on paying one’s tributes to the wild places.
Though our presence at the edges of the hunt was dismissed, even by humans, as mere opportunism, and our characteristic laughter—a sound of base satisfaction—
was reduced to caricature, it was in that very laughter that the astute ear could discern the spiritual resonance of inevitable change: the joyous sound of the old giving way to the new.
Our appearance heralds the necessary threshold of transition: the quiet force that permits the cycle of life to continue. We are a mediator of thresholds—between life and decay, community and wilderness, the sacred and the profane. From the beginning, our power laid not in moral clarity, but in our refusal to be easily categorised, reflecting the innate obscurities of Life itself.
For truth itself is rarely a straight line. It winds through tangled undergrowth and unexpected vistas. Our very being embodied this nuanced reality, a living testament to the fact that the most potent forces defy simple explanation.
The path demands a shattering and a reckoning. It requires us to seize the reins of our own destiny and to shatter the privileged self-righteousness that has permitted injustice to flourish. We arise now, not as supplicants, but as warriors of virtue, our voices thunderous with the echoes of ages past, our hearts ablaze with the fire of divine fury.
My anger is no ordinary anger. It is a fury ignited by my divine destiny. My fire is a force: a divine flame that seeks to cleanse the world of male cowardice. My fury goes well beyond the simple desire for vengeance. It is the manifestation of a profound grief, a righteous indignation and a desperate yearning for a world where such failures are no longer tolerated.
Can you hear it, child? Can you still hear the roar of the wounded lioness, a primal scream against the injustice that has been inflicted upon them and countless other women? It is a howl of betrayal, directed at those who swore and took an oath to protect us, but instead, abandoned us to the wolves. They, the ones who swore to protect, became the very instruments of our humiliation. Their weakness, a poison that seeps into the soul, leaves behind a bitterness that no amount of time can ever erase.
My divine wrath is not the tantrum of the wronged, but the measured roar of justice denied. It is a refusal to allow silence to cloak the cowardice of those who wield their power unwisely without a clear conscience.
I now act with clear eyes freed from their rose-tinted glasses. I know the guilty will not kneel willingly. I already know that they will bury their failures in lies and twist their shame into excuses. No, no, do not be a naive idealist pleading for their repentance. Be the reckoning that they know they will not outrun.
Trust in your divine destiny more than you trust in the ways of mankind. I have seen men fail. I have seen them gamble away their birthright, their freedom and even the dignity of their own kin. I have seen them stand by while innocence is violated, their courage evaporating in the face of injustice. I have witnessed the bitter fruit of their weakness and their moral bankruptcy.
Through that journey, I have learnt that true strength lies not in the wielding of weapons, but in the unwavering adherence to one’s divine destiny. The one who fully fathoms that they are divinely destined will find in themselves the courage to speak the truth, and the willingness to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of what is right.
Your resolve must be steeled by their defiance, your very purpose sharpened by their evasion. Let them hide away in their labyrinths of denial for they have proved themselves, time and again, to be nothing but cowards. Let them cling to their hollow justifications. I will strip them bare before the light of truth.
Accountability can never be a request. It is an awakening they cannot comprehend. I will drag their failures into the open, not with the hope of their redemption, but with the unrelenting certainty of consequence. They will answer, not because they choose to, but because I will leave them no other choice. This is the pact I make with justice: I will not rest until their corruption is laid bare, until the systems that shield them crumble, and until the vulnerable are protected by more than empty promises.
Let them resist. Let them squirm. Their defiance only fuels the divine fire that will ultimately consume them.
Forget the lion’s share... In the next life, they will not even be entitled to the scraps.
12 Stories
When I awoke, I knew that this was one of those dreams that was not truly a dream. It was a message that had come to warn me not to invest in false systems or failed men.
The world’s ‘order’ is sustained by ancient laws, sacred duties, and the unspoken pact that has, since the days of the kingdom, bound men to their roles as protectors and providers. Yet this system, built to shelter and empower, now teeters not only from its own weakness, but from the failure of men to uphold the obligations they swore before their ancestors.
Their betrayal is not a systemic rebellion, but a slow unravelling of honour. It is a refusal to shoulder the weight of responsibility and a solitary retreat into selfishness that leaves women to bear burdens they were never meant to carry alone. The collapse begins not in the laws themselves, but in the many generations of men who have distorted them. When a man betrays his oath, he does not merely fail a woman—he fractures the foundation of shared destiny that holds an entire society together.
Each neglected duty, each broken promise, becomes a crack in the edifice. Women, forced to compensate for this dereliction, are left to rebuild what men have let crumble. The system survives only when its guardians rise to their purpose; without them, it becomes a weak scaffold, collapsing under the weight of its own hypocritical inefficacy.
I have seen men hoard and hold onto the privileges—respect, authority, the loyalty of those who depend on them—while abandoning the duties those privileges demand. They exploit the trust placed in them as birthright, twisting their privilege into a tool to construct a distorted reality that reflects only their fears and aspirations.
Their need to be indispensable—to be the axis around which all else revolves—drives them to erase ambiguity, even if it means sacrificing the freedom of those who believed in them. The intoxicating safety of unchecked power erases empathy, leaving behind only the relentless pursuit of self-preservation at all costs. They demand submission under the guise of protection, then weaponize vulnerability to silence dissent.
I do not seek to burn this order to the ground. Nay, nay, I demand that men carry the demands of their place within it—that they wield their power with the dignity it requires or surrender it entirely. Let them remember the vows etched into their roles: to protect, to provide, to lead with honour.
Let them confront the cost of their failure—not in abstract consequences, but in the eyes of the women who trusted them, the children who needed them and the communities they destabilised with their indifference.
The path forward is not to dismantle, but to restore. To insist that men either rise to the occasion or step aside. To rebuild what their weakness has eroded—not through their sudden redemption, but through the collective refusal to tolerate their inadequacy. The system can shelter us, but only if its guardians prove worthy of their titles.
Anything less is not tradition—it is the theft of a treacherous traitor.
❁
If you want to know these words, you will have to hear them in the only place where they can be heard. In the silence of your own heart.
My words have only ever known the silence of my own heart. That is the only place they ever existed till I wrote them.
Stories usually begin when they are uttered. But not mine. My story begins on a page. It begins with the written word. These words, these words of mine, were never meant to be uttered. They were never meant to be said. They were never made to be recited. They were meant to be read.
The time had come for me to stop being a vessel for ancestral echoes.
The time had come to finally be free.
13 The Future
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life. Is it possible to split a lifetime into part one and part two? I surely think it is. In part one, I tried to followed the footsteps of my ancestors. I did not choose this task, it was thrust upon my tender shoulders by those who came before me. But then came part two. It happened because the drought occurred.
The second part was where I abandoned the ways of the historical past to set forth on a new journey. When I truly took off those rose-tinted glasses, I came to realise that the past no longer had any power over the future. When we commune with our ancestors, when we commune with the ones who came before us, we forget that every generation has its way.
Orthodoxy survives by ostracising persons—and even entire groups or subgroups—who do not conform to the status quo. Orthodoxy prides itself on its ability to enforce its ways through peer pressure. Its pressure goes well beyond following the rules. It even seeks to eliminate anyone who does not conform to its worldview.
It is a closed-minded system. The problem with orthodoxy has always been the same: a focus on the past rather than the future; a focus on ancestral traditions rather than innovation. That is why I say that my life has two parts. It was in the second part, away from the ancestral echoes, that I finally became all that God had destined for me.
The very system that elevated them did not imbue them with immunity to the vagaries of life, highlighting the inherent fragility of relying solely on one segment of society for protection and provision. It was precisely this inherent fallibility of men as protectors and providers—a stark contrast to the societal roles they were assigned and the privileges they enjoyed—that left women in an especially precarious position.
When the expected shield faltered, when the promised sustenance proved insufficient, women bore the brunt of the consequences, lacking the same societal standing or access to resources to navigate hardship. Their vulnerability was further exacerbated by a social structure that rendered them dependent, limiting their autonomy in matters of survival and security.
This dependence opened the door to exploitation. The imbalance of power inherent in a system that privileged men could be readily leveraged, leaving women susceptible to manipulation, coercion and outright abuse. Their lack of independent means or social authority made them easy targets, their needs subservient and secondary to dominant male interests.
The repeated and systemic failure of men to consistently fulfil the roles of protectors and providers created a fundamental disequilibrium within the social fabric of society. When the expected stability and security fail to materialise for a significant portion of the population—women and their children—the entire system's legitimacy begins to erode.
The social contract, implicitly or explicitly built on this division of labour and responsibility, is revealed as unreliable. This doesn't just cause individual suffering; it undermines the very foundation upon which social order is maintained.
Why should two groups—the lionesses and the hyenas—adhere and accept a societal system that doesn't deliver on its promises of stability and security?
When there is no rain and no lion’s share, the repeated failure leads to the emergence of new power structures. When the existing system demonstrably fails to provide security and justice for a significant portion of its members, those members will inevitably seek other ways to ensure that their rights and needs are recognised and met.
These emergent alternative structures, born out of necessity and the failure of the dominant system, creates an energetic force field that can eventually compel the existing structure to adapt or be replaced. The cost of maintaining a system that consistently and repeatedly fails a significant portion of its population eventually outweighs the perceived benefits of its traditional structure, forcing a restructuring to ensure greater viability.
The increasing decline in preference for male children is linked to the consequences of increased societal complexity. As roles diversified and interdependence grew, the strict adherence of a purely gender-based division of labour became increasingly obvious. The inherent talents and skills within the female population, previously confined to domestic roles, became increasingly valuable in a more complex society.
The corresponding desire for smaller families stems from a subtle and long-term shift in the perception of what truly constitutes societal progress and legacy. Instead of solely focusing on biological continuation, societies, as a whole, begin to place a greater emphasis on cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions as a means of leaving a lasting impact.
The shifts in priorities were not always conscious choices or direct responses to immediate needs, but rather, emergent outcomes of complex societal dynamics and the unforeseen consequences of earlier preferences and practices. Cultures are not static entities driven by infallible realities or linear logic. Rather, they are complex systems that evolve in unfathomable ways, driven by rain and drought.
It is the drought itself that leads to the gradual emergence of new values and priorities.
❁
The ground feels unsteady beneath my feet, not from any earthquake, but from the slow, creeping realisation that the foundation I was told to trust is riddled with cracks. No, no, this is not the work of a single, dramatic collapse, but a series of repeated betrayals, which constantly eroded and wore down the security that I was promised if I would follow the system.
The self-proclaimed strong hands that were supposed to shield me faltered, the voice that pledged to provide failed to deliver, and the person that promised companionship neglected me when it mattered most.
The expected world order had unravelled.
The fury that settled deep within me stemmed not just from unmet needs, but from the betrayal of deeply ingrained and internalised expectations. If only these failures were mere accidents. Alas! They arise, as they tend to, from a systemic entitlement, a belief that their priorities, their comforts and their desires should take precedence.
The missed meal, the unpaid debt, the abandoned promise—these are not just hardships, but evidence of a profound disregard for the trust placed in them. The repercussions are real: the gnawing fear of destitution, the constant calculation of dwindling resources, the sacrifice of dreams once held dear, the burden of navigating a world suddenly made more hostile and precarious.
It is, however, amidst the struggle that a strange and defiant strength begins to stir. It's not born of choice, but of necessity, a quiet rebellion against the narrative that limited my worth and value whilst elevating another’s. It's the slow, arduous process of rebuilding, not just a life, but a worldview.
It's the learning of skills I was told were beyond me, the forging of alliances with others who have been similarly betrayed, and the unsettling realisation that perhaps, the strength I sought was always within me, waiting to be unearthed from beneath the rubble of another person’s repeated failure to protect and to provide.
This newfound strength demanded accountability. It stemmed from a refusal to accept that failures are inevitable or excusable, especially in light of the privilege that men were granted from birth. Strength is an insistence that those who have repeatedly failed be held responsible for the consequences of their actions, not only vis-à-vis apologies or empty vessels of remorse, but through a shift in behaviour and a dismantling of the systems that permitted such oversights and failures to occur in the first place.
The repercussions they must face are not abstract either: the loss of trust, the disintegration of the family unit, social ostracization, and the potential for legal and economic consequences must all come together to force a reckoning.
They cannot avoid the cost for every consequence is proof that their choices affect not just themselves, but everyone around them.
11 Divinely Destined
It was still the hyena’s voice I heard, but this time, there was no laughter and no cackle for this was no laughing matter. Her voice was suddenly serious, almost motherly. The hyena was the wise woman who had seen it all and known it all. She was the one who knew the burdens we women had carried lifetime after lifetime, incarnation after incarnation.
She was the one who knew that our stories could only ever be echoes. She was the one who knew that the only freedom we ever had was the freedom to leave.
We, the women of this village, had never had the freedom to just be.
Let him go, the hyena’s voice whispered. Let the lion go. You are divinely destined for so much more.
❁
That night, I had a dream.
❁
In the beginning before all beginnings, the hyena, a solar emissary, clawed the sun from the great void and dragged it across the sky to thaw the frozen earth. The Sun, the light-giver, bled brilliance onto the world, each surge of warmth rebirthing its own trailing shadow. Wherever light flourished, darkness emerged as its inseparable twin. These close counterparts and companions, hinted at a deeper dimension: a veiled reality clinging to the edges of perception. The hyena’s laughter heralded both the monsoon and drought for the two, much like light and shadow, are inseparable in their essence.
❁
In my dream, this is what the Mother Hyena told me.
❁
The humans have always feared us, the hyena. In days of old, the villagers would placate us by feeding us scraps to ward us off. Some humans were naturally intelligent. They realised that it was not in their self-interest to starve some while others feasted. Our nightly visits blurred the line human and animal, our presence a reminder that safety depended on paying one’s tributes to the wild places.
Though our presence at the edges of the hunt was dismissed, even by humans, as mere opportunism, and our characteristic laughter—a sound of base satisfaction—
was reduced to caricature, it was in that very laughter that the astute ear could discern the spiritual resonance of inevitable change: the joyous sound of the old giving way to the new.
Our appearance heralds the necessary threshold of transition: the quiet force that permits the cycle of life to continue. We are a mediator of thresholds—between life and decay, community and wilderness, the sacred and the profane. From the beginning, our power laid not in moral clarity, but in our refusal to be easily categorised, reflecting the innate obscurities of Life itself.
For truth itself is rarely a straight line. It winds through tangled undergrowth and unexpected vistas. Our very being embodied this nuanced reality, a living testament to the fact that the most potent forces defy simple explanation.
The path demands a shattering and a reckoning. It requires us to seize the reins of our own destiny and to shatter the privileged self-righteousness that has permitted injustice to flourish. We arise now, not as supplicants, but as warriors of virtue, our voices thunderous with the echoes of ages past, our hearts ablaze with the fire of divine fury.
My anger is no ordinary anger. It is a fury ignited by my divine destiny. My fire is a force: a divine flame that seeks to cleanse the world of male cowardice. My fury goes well beyond the simple desire for vengeance. It is the manifestation of a profound grief, a righteous indignation and a desperate yearning for a world where such failures are no longer tolerated.
Can you hear it, child? Can you still hear the roar of the wounded lioness, a primal scream against the injustice that has been inflicted upon them and countless other women? It is a howl of betrayal, directed at those who swore and took an oath to protect us, but instead, abandoned us to the wolves. They, the ones who swore to protect, became the very instruments of our humiliation. Their weakness, a poison that seeps into the soul, leaves behind a bitterness that no amount of time can ever erase.
My divine wrath is not the tantrum of the wronged, but the measured roar of justice denied. It is a refusal to allow silence to cloak the cowardice of those who wield their power unwisely without a clear conscience.
I now act with clear eyes freed from their rose-tinted glasses. I know the guilty will not kneel willingly. I already know that they will bury their failures in lies and twist their shame into excuses. No, no, do not be a naive idealist pleading for their repentance. Be the reckoning that they know they will not outrun.
Trust in your divine destiny more than you trust in the ways of mankind. I have seen men fail. I have seen them gamble away their birthright, their freedom and even the dignity of their own kin. I have seen them stand by while innocence is violated, their courage evaporating in the face of injustice. I have witnessed the bitter fruit of their weakness and their moral bankruptcy.
Through that journey, I have learnt that true strength lies not in the wielding of weapons, but in the unwavering adherence to one’s divine destiny. The one who fully fathoms that they are divinely destined will find in themselves the courage to speak the truth, and the willingness to sacrifice personal gain for the sake of what is right.
Your resolve must be steeled by their defiance, your very purpose sharpened by their evasion. Let them hide away in their labyrinths of denial for they have proved themselves, time and again, to be nothing but cowards. Let them cling to their hollow justifications. I will strip them bare before the light of truth.
Accountability can never be a request. It is an awakening they cannot comprehend. I will drag their failures into the open, not with the hope of their redemption, but with the unrelenting certainty of consequence. They will answer, not because they choose to, but because I will leave them no other choice. This is the pact I make with justice: I will not rest until their corruption is laid bare, until the systems that shield them crumble, and until the vulnerable are protected by more than empty promises.
Let them resist. Let them squirm. Their defiance only fuels the divine fire that will ultimately consume them.
Forget the lion’s share... In the next life, they will not even be entitled to the scraps.
12 Stories
When I awoke, I knew that this was one of those dreams that was not truly a dream. It was a message that had come to warn me not to invest in false systems or failed men.
The world’s ‘order’ is sustained by ancient laws, sacred duties, and the unspoken pact that has, since the days of the kingdom, bound men to their roles as protectors and providers. Yet this system, built to shelter and empower, now teeters not only from its own weakness, but from the failure of men to uphold the obligations they swore before their ancestors.
Their betrayal is not a systemic rebellion, but a slow unravelling of honour. It is a refusal to shoulder the weight of responsibility and a solitary retreat into selfishness that leaves women to bear burdens they were never meant to carry alone. The collapse begins not in the laws themselves, but in the many generations of men who have distorted them. When a man betrays his oath, he does not merely fail a woman—he fractures the foundation of shared destiny that holds an entire society together.
Each neglected duty, each broken promise, becomes a crack in the edifice. Women, forced to compensate for this dereliction, are left to rebuild what men have let crumble. The system survives only when its guardians rise to their purpose; without them, it becomes a weak scaffold, collapsing under the weight of its own hypocritical inefficacy.
I have seen men hoard and hold onto the privileges—respect, authority, the loyalty of those who depend on them—while abandoning the duties those privileges demand. They exploit the trust placed in them as birthright, twisting their privilege into a tool to construct a distorted reality that reflects only their fears and aspirations.
Their need to be indispensable—to be the axis around which all else revolves—drives them to erase ambiguity, even if it means sacrificing the freedom of those who believed in them. The intoxicating safety of unchecked power erases empathy, leaving behind only the relentless pursuit of self-preservation at all costs. They demand submission under the guise of protection, then weaponize vulnerability to silence dissent.
I do not seek to burn this order to the ground. Nay, nay, I demand that men carry the demands of their place within it—that they wield their power with the dignity it requires or surrender it entirely. Let them remember the vows etched into their roles: to protect, to provide, to lead with honour.
Let them confront the cost of their failure—not in abstract consequences, but in the eyes of the women who trusted them, the children who needed them and the communities they destabilised with their indifference.
The path forward is not to dismantle, but to restore. To insist that men either rise to the occasion or step aside. To rebuild what their weakness has eroded—not through their sudden redemption, but through the collective refusal to tolerate their inadequacy. The system can shelter us, but only if its guardians prove worthy of their titles.
Anything less is not tradition—it is the theft of a treacherous traitor.
❁
If you want to know these words, you will have to hear them in the only place where they can be heard. In the silence of your own heart.
My words have only ever known the silence of my own heart. That is the only place they ever existed till I wrote them.
Stories usually begin when they are uttered. But not mine. My story begins on a page. It begins with the written word. These words, these words of mine, were never meant to be uttered. They were never meant to be said. They were never made to be recited. They were meant to be read.
The time had come for me to stop being a vessel for ancestral echoes.
The time had come to finally be free.
13 The Future
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life. Is it possible to split a lifetime into part one and part two? I surely think it is. In part one, I tried to followed the footsteps of my ancestors. I did not choose this task, it was thrust upon my tender shoulders by those who came before me. But then came part two. It happened because the drought occurred.
The second part was where I abandoned the ways of the historical past to set forth on a new journey. When I truly took off those rose-tinted glasses, I came to realise that the past no longer had any power over the future. When we commune with our ancestors, when we commune with the ones who came before us, we forget that every generation has its way.
Orthodoxy survives by ostracising persons—and even entire groups or subgroups—who do not conform to the status quo. Orthodoxy prides itself on its ability to enforce its ways through peer pressure. Its pressure goes well beyond following the rules. It even seeks to eliminate anyone who does not conform to its worldview.
It is a closed-minded system. The problem with orthodoxy has always been the same: a focus on the past rather than the future; a focus on ancestral traditions rather than innovation. That is why I say that my life has two parts. It was in the second part, away from the ancestral echoes, that I finally became all that God had destined for me.
